My Evil Twin Is a Supervillain

by David Solomons

  “Really? How do you know that?”

  “Comics,” I said. She shot me a doubtful look, which I ignored.

  We wrapped up the game of Monopoly. It was time for Lara to head home. Tomorrow was Sunday and we agreed to recommence our hunt for Zack’s hiding place at first light, or possibly after breakfast. Lara stopped in the doorway and stood there in uneasy silence.

  “Everything OK?” I went to see what had unsettled her.

  A sliver of the setting sun was missing. Of course, it hadn’t actually gone anywhere, it was just obscured. “It’s only an eclipse,” I said.

  “Don’t look directly at it,” she warned. “It’s weird. Usually things like eclipses are all over the news before they occur. There’s been no mention of this one.”

  As she said it I felt a shiver that wasn’t caused by the cold evening air. I recalled that in olden times people feared eclipses, but not because of the damage they could do to your vision. They thought monsters were devouring the sun, or trying to steal it.

  “It’s probably nothing to worry about,” she said.

  But neither of us believed her.

  As we stood there the air filled with a long, drawn-out hiss, as if some giant snake had slithered into the garden. From my vantage point in the door of the tree house I could see the source of the sound. Dozens of stray cats congregated on the street, hissing up at the broken sun.

  Unzipping my sleeping bag I sat up and stretched. Instead of its typical warm, golden glow, the sunlight that slid into the tree house appeared washed out. Sickly. I went to the doorway and craned my neck to look east.

  The sun glared low in the sky like an infected eye. The shadow from last night had spread so that a quarter of the sun was engulfed in darkness. By now a regular eclipse would have completed its crossing, which meant that this was something else. No doubt something very bad.

  I went back inside, pulled on my clothes and broke open the supplies Lara had left me for breakfast. Unfortunately, it was the last two boxes of cereal from a Variety pack and they were both Multi-Grain Rice Krispies. I was about to force them down when I was interrupted by the sound of humming from the garden. It was a cheerless tune, and also vaguely familiar.

  With a creak the top of the rope ladder tensed. Someone was climbing up.

  The dismal humming drew closer. I looked around for an alternative exit, but the tree house was strictly one way in and out. I decided that if I ever got home again I’d install an escape hatch in mine, but for now I was trapped.

  A mane of perfectly styled hair crested the edge of the tree house landing, followed by a face I knew all too well.

  Serge.

  Except that this wasn’t my best friend – it was Evil Serge. We set eyes on one another at the same time and he instantly stopped humming.

  Evil Serge regarded me with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. He was carrying a takeaway cup on which was balanced a large slab of chocolate brownie. Placing both down carefully, he attempted to cross from the ladder to the tree house. As he stepped off, the ladder swayed to one side and he lurched awkwardly, leaving one foot on the top rung, one hand clawing the wooden deck. With a grunt he finally spanned the gap and flopped on the deck like a haddock. He may have been evil, but I was relieved to see that he and my Serge displayed the same level of physical prowess. Face down like that I saw he was wearing a backpack themed with a colourful image of supervillain Two-Face. Which felt like a bad sign.

  He jumped to his feet, collected his hot beverage and brownie, and brushed down what looked like a silk waistcoat.

  Neither of us spoke. From what Lara had told me of his rep (when you have a reputation as fearsome as Evil Serge’s it’s called a rep), I was in serious trouble.

  He broke the silence. “This morning I stopped by Bean Me Up, Scottie for my usual Sunday order.” He held up the cup and brownie. “Constellation Class Hot Chocolate with a Photon Chocpedo.” He plucked the brownie off the lid and took a sip of the drink. “While there I spotted someone else in the queue. Can you guess who that might have been?”

  I shook my head.

  “Luke. Parker.” He raised one eyebrow. “Can you explain this?”

  “That might take a while.”

  Serge nibbled the end of the brownie. “Then allow me to speculate on the various possibilities. One – it was you. You collected your breakfast combo, rushed back here and, for whatever reason would possess you, changed into these clothes.” He sneered at my choice of sweatshirt. “Two – I have stumbled into some multiverse monkey business and you are an identical Luke Parker from a different world. Which means either you are my most detested foe, or his entirely innocent double from another dimension.”

  “That one! I’m the innocent one!” I insisted. He took a step towards me and I shrank back, blurting out the reason for my presence. “Stellar kidnapped my brother from my world and I came to yours to rescue him.”

  If Evil Serge was anything at all like mine, then he was the one person in this universe who might accept my hurried and extraordinary explanation without a shred of evidence. I could see him weighing it up.

  His free hand moved quickly, delving into a pocket. I flinched in expectation at what he might pull out. To my relief I saw it was his inhaler.

  “My name is Serge LeFlaive. I could have been un super-héros, but I was betrayed.” He took a suck of Ventolin. “By Luke Parker.”

  Serge and I sat in the tree house among Lara’s collection of board games. He removed his Two-Face backpack and set it down next to him.

  “I come here every Sunday. Sometimes I listen to my music, or read, but mostly I come to remember.” He sighed. “Once, Luke and I were friends. Best friends, or so I believed. We shared a common love of comics.”

  So far, so identical.

  “I was with him for the final battle between Cap and Red Skull in Captain America number 300. I was with him for the unveiling of Superior Spider-Man’s new costume. And I was with him on the fateful evening when Zorbon the Decider visited for the first time.”

  That was not how it had played out in my world. “Then you know that he’s Stellar.”

  He nodded. “I believe that I am the only one.”

  I informed him that Lara was in on the secret now, but something puzzled me about his version of the story. “So if you were in the tree house when Zorbon was giving out powers, then how come you’re not a superhero too?”

  His nostrils flared, a vein stood out on his temple and he muttered a stream of angry French words. “Treachery,” he spat. “Faced with the glowing majesty of Zorbon the Decider, I reacted as any normal person would. I felt an asthma attack coming on. But when I searched for my inhaler, it was nowhere to be found. Then Luke announced that he remembered seeing it back in the house, on the kitchen table. So, immediately I climbed down and went to look. The inhaler was not in the kitchen. Thankfully, the attack came to nothing and soon I was able to return to the tree house. But when I got there, Zorbon was gone – and Luke had superpowers.” He stopped to draw breath. “And there was my inhaler. It had been in the tree house all along. Luke claimed to have found it after I left, hidden beneath an issue of Fantastic Four.” Serge squeezed the chocolate brownie in his fist. “Menteur! Liar! He wanted the powers all for himself.”

  I wondered how I would’ve reacted in the same circumstances. I hoped I’d have been happy for Serge to become a superhero too, but what if it had been an either/or situation? I didn’t like to think what I would have done to ensure that I was the Chosen One.

  “Is it possible Luke was telling the truth?” I suggested, fearful of provoking another angry outburst. “Maybe you really did misplace it.”

  Serge shook his head. “I too could have been a superhero, except that my friend hid my inhaler.” He paused. “And now, with your assistance, I will have my revenge.”

  “Uh, it’s not really a vengeance thing I’m going for,” I said. “It has more of a rescue flavour.”

  I studied my alter
nate-world best friend as he downed his hot chocolate and squished brownie. I felt sure that this Serge would prove to be a formidable ally in any confrontation with Stellar. He may not possess actual superpowers but his mere presence instilled fear, which was pretty close. And vengeance has always been a great motivator for super-characters. Batman, Robin, Doctor Doom, Punisher, the list is endless. Although, when I thought about it, those feelings didn’t exactly make for the most healthy, well-adjusted people.

  “Uh, Luke, are you OK?” Lara’s quizzical voice came from the doorway. She peered in at us. Her mouth hung open and then she pressed her lips together in puzzlement. Fair to say she had not expected to find me and the most feared bully in school shooting the breeze. I could tell that a jumble of questions was whizzing through her mind.

  “It’s OK, he’s on our side,” I said, quickly explaining Serge’s presence. I turned to him. “You are, right?”

  He gave a less than enthusiastic shrug and unzipped his backpack.

  “Great,” said Lara nervously. “The more help the better, right?”

  There was a skitter of claws as something moved among the board games, upsetting the neat stack. They toppled to the floor.

  Lara flinched and shut her eyes. “Please tell me it isn’t a rat.”

  It wasn’t. The offending creature hopped into full view.

  “Un écureuil?” said Serge.

  I assumed that was French for squirrel, because that’s what it was: a bushy tailed grey squirrel. I would’ve said it was staring right at me, but since its eyes are on the side of its head it was more of a sideways look. “Maybe it lives here,” I said.

  “You mean it’s a homing squirrel?” Lara nodded thoughtfully. “Do you get those?”

  “Non, I come to the tree house every week,” said Serge, “and have never before seen this creature.”

  It began to circle the fallen board games. If I didn’t know better I’d have said it was searching for something. With a whirl of paws it dislodged one of the boxes and thumped its tail on the fallen cover.

  “Scrabble?” I said. The squirrel lifted its head and looked at me as if it understood.

  “What are you doing?” asked Lara dubiously. “You know it can’t understand you, right?”

  “In my universe Dark Flutter is always surrounded by small woodland creatures. I wonder…” I removed the board from the box and deposited the letter tiles next to it. No sooner had I done so than the squirrel nosed a letter on to the board, quickly following it with several more. A jumble of letters grew across the board. I sounded them out. “I.S.T.H. I.S.T.H. I.N. G.O.N. That’s complete nonsense.” I was disappointed, although I’m not sure what I’d expected.

  Serge reached past me. Without changing the order of the letters, he adjusted how they were grouped. I sounded them out once more.

  “I.S. T.H.I.S. T.H.I.N.G. O.N.” No way. “Is this thing on?”

  Lara gasped. “I don’t believe it.”

  The squirrel’s nose twitched and then it bounded back to the pile of letters, pushing another batch on to the board.

  S.C.A.R.F.I.S.H.E.R.E.

  “Scarfish ’ere?” Lara pored over the letters.

  This time I knew what it was trying to spell. “S.C.A.R.F. is here,” I mouthed, turning excitedly to the others. “It’s the Superhero Covert Alliance Reaction Force. On a triple-word score!” Somehow my Lara was using her Dark Flutter powers to communicate from her universe to this one, through the squirrel. My friends had found me.

  “L.U.K.E. W.E. H.A.V.E. V.I.T.A.L. I.N.F.O.R.M.A.T.I.O.N.”

  There was a short delay as the squirrel gathered more letters.

  “O.I. N.O. T.A.I.L. G.I.M.M.E. N.U.T.Z.” That didn’t seem terribly vital, unless you were a squirrel. There was a pause and then more letters.

  “S.O.R.R.Y. A.B.O.U.T. T.H.A.T.”

  Dark Flutter must have regained control. Another sentence took shape.

  “I.T. I. S. T.H.E. E.N.D. O.F. T.H.E. W.O.R.D.”

  Well, that wasn’t too bad. Of all the disasters that could have befallen us, that seemed fairly low on the list. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the squirrel pushing one more letter towards the board. It deposited the final tile and sat back. I reviewed the altered sentence.

  I.T. I. S. T.H.E. E.N.D. O.F. T.H.E. W.O.R.L.D.

  There were only ninety-eight letter tiles in the Scrabble box (plus two blanks), which meant we had to endure a painstaking wait for the squirrel to spell out S.C.A.R.F.’s shocking discovery. It took long enough that formerly Evil Serge moved on to his next meal of the day. He dug out a Magneto-themed lunch box from his backpack and popped the lid. It was like unsealing the ancient tomb of someone who’d been buried with a lot of fish.

  Lara pinched her nose. “What is that smell?”

  Serge lifted out a pile of bread doorsteps and assessed their filling. “Egg and anchovy,” he said. “Ugh. What is this?” He drew out a Babybel cheese snack. “Where is my Brie?”

  I returned my attention to the Scrabble board. It seemed that the Serge in my universe had sifted through all the parallel-world storylines in comics he could find and, drawing on his extensive reading, had come up with a theory about the gerbil-holes.

  “I don’t get it,” said Lara, scanning the board when the squirrel had finally finished. “Obviously I haven’t read enough comics.”

  I rooted through the rest of the games. “I think this will help to explain,” I said, removing a box from the stack.

  “Jenga?” she said.

  “It’s the best way to represent in a simple and clear fashion what’s going on,” I said. “It was either this, or Connect 4.”

  I made space on the floor and assembled a tower of wooden blocks. “Now, imagine this is the multiverse,” I said. “Here’s what happens when Stellar pulls an object from another universe.” Carefully, I slid out one wooden block from the middle of the tower. It remained upright. I eased out another. This time the tower wobbled but held in place. “Each time Stellar creates a gerbil-hole, the risk increases. It might be the next hole, or the one after that, but at some point…” I whipped out a block from the base of the tower. It swayed once and collapsed in a clicking cascade.

  “He is turning the multiverse into Emmental,” said Serge. “It is a holey cheese.”

  “Like Jarlsberg?” asked Lara.

  “It is firm like Jarlsberg but exhibits a nutty flavour.”

  Serge had ignored my excellent Jenga comparison in order to go dairy instead, but this version of my friend still scared me, so I didn’t object. And anyway, he was essentially correct.

  With the squirrel’s revelation our mission hadn’t changed, but now there was an additional objective. “We have to rescue my brother,” I said. “And we have to do so while preventing Stellar from creating any more holes in the universe.”

  What was already a tall order had just doubled in height. Lara gagged at the whiff rising from Serge’s sandwiches. “I need some fresh air.”

  We followed her out on to the tree-house deck. From our vantage we had a view over the surrounding streets. The partially eclipsed sun shed an uneasy half-light across the rooftops.

  “Somewhere out there Stellar is holding Zack.” Lara swept an arm to the horizon. “The question is where?”

  The problem was he could be anywhere. Perhaps not even in Bromley. Stellar could easily have flown him halfway across the world. If this were a board game, we were on square one.

  As difficult as the challenge was that faced us, I wasn’t about to give up. “It would have to be somewhere far from starlight so that Zack can’t recharge his powers.” I thought back to my arrival in this world. “And somewhere that would muffle his telepathy.”

  “A nuclear bunker?” said Serge.

  “In Bromley?” Lara dismissed the suggestion.

  Serge offered another possibility. “Per’aps an undersea lair?”

  “There’s the Pavilion Leisure Centre,” said Lara. “It has a pool.”

>   It wasn’t the worst idea. After all, the Alien Overlord’s mothership had been disguised as a secondary school, and the last supervillain I’d encountered based himself in a comic shop designed to look like a volcano.

  “If I was Stellar,” mused Lara, “where would I hide Zack?”

  “That is not the question.” Serge pressed a finger to my chest. “If you were Stellar…”

  “Yes, of course!” Lara leapt on his suggestion. “You two are the same. You think alike. The answer is in your head.”

  Ever since Stellar had arrived in my world I’d protested to anyone who’d listen that he and I were not the same person, but maybe she was on to something.

  Lara gripped my shoulders and fixed me in the eye. “To trap the squirrel you must think like one.”

  To find my brother I had to think myself into Stellar’s mind. So, if I was a supervillain, where would I keep a superhero under wraps?

  I closed my eyes and in my head began to repeat the same phrase over and over.

  “I am Stellar.”

  My body remained at the tree house but my mind began to drift. Soon I was above the wasteland of the garden looking down on rats picking over scraps. Out over Moore Street I flew, the mewing of stray cats rising up from the weed-torn pavement. Strange winds blew me across the park. And then I was floating along the High Street.

  I heard Serge and Lara’s distant voices.

  “Think evil.”

  “Are your minds melding yet?”

  I shut them out and redoubled my efforts.

  I am Stellar. I am Stellar.

  I drifted higher, edging towards the black of the eclipse, which extended like an endless tunnel through the blue sky.

  A tunnel!

  I blinked. I was back. Lara and Serge’s expectant faces greeted me. I grinned. I knew where Stellar was holding Zack.

  “He’s in the Batcave.”

  I inspected the cave entrance for signs of fresh footprints. The dirt surface was as smooth as I’d left it. No one had been in, or out. Before I went deeper in I glanced up at the eclipse. It was all over the news. The world had woken to the ping of alerts across every device. After what happened with Nemesis, people were understandably twitchy. To the world’s collective relief another rogue asteroid had been ruled out. The experts who’d been wheeled out to comment on the phenomenon all agreed that this was not a typical solar eclipse, when the moon passes between the sun and Earth. However, none of the talking heads could come up with a reasonable explanation for what was going on. I didn’t know either, but I hoped it was a sign that something wicked was on its way to Earth. I was longing for an army of evil space slugs. Zack and I needed to bond. What better way than by teaming up to battle a slimy global threat?